


Just a Bad Nightmare

by Mari_UC



Series: JayTim - Just a Nightmare [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Established Relationship, Jason POV, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-04 02:41:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14583156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mari_UC/pseuds/Mari_UC
Summary: He wanted the darkness. He wished to go back to that dark warehouse, he wanted to be surrounded by that pool of blood, haunted by the Clown. He wanted to wake up into that nightmare; because then, this crimson hell would be just a dream.





	Just a Bad Nightmare

Darkness wasn’t something new to him. He’d spent far too many nights in dark alleyways as a child, hiding. Either as a means to escape or as a ploy to catch his target unaware. He didn’t particularly enjoyed darkness, but he was familiar with it. Opening his eyes to complete darkness didn’t faze him as much as it would most people.

But there was something _wrong_ with this darkness. It wasn’t a closed alleyway or a deep closet. It wasn’t a darkened room with the windows shut. It wasn’t even a coffin. And he knew the _wrongness_ in the darkness of a closed coffin.

This darkness, however, was different. This darkness he could feel. In his eyes, in his skin, in his breath.

In his ragged breath and his heartbeat, which so far were the only sounds present in the darkness. Deep, calm breaths marked by a rhythmic thumping of his heart.

Oddly enough, it didn’t annoyed or unnerved him. On the contrary, it calmed him. The sounds, creating a background that anchored him within the darkness. The _wrongness_ subsided as he focused on the breathing and the thumping of his heart.

On the evidence that he is actually _alive._

He tried to move his body, surprised to find that he could. He took a tentative step forward, and his body complied. No sound on the surface below his feet. He crouched and extended his hands, trying to touch the surface of the floor to identify it. His hands stopped on a smooth warm surface. It felt too smooth to be concrete, sand or stone. Either polished wood or ceramic would have been a safer choice, if it wasn’t for the warmth radiated from the surface.

He stood again trying to gauge a sense of where he should move, but the darkness didn’t allow him to orient himself. _So, forward it is._ It was as good a destination as anywhere else.

The warm floor and the calming sounds kept him from letting his mind go rogue on him. The insistent feeling that there was something wrong with this picture. That he shouldn’t be _here_. Wherever here was.

The feeling of the unnatural darkness surrounding him remained, forming a soft pressure all around him. Like he was walking underwater. Only the sounds of his living body managed to let him put those thoughts aside. Focusing instead of trying to move away from the darkness. Somewhere calmer.

His feet kept touching the warm smooth floor without making any sound, and his eyes kept showing him nothingness. He’d even touched his eyelids to make sure his eyes were open. It truly made no difference one way or the other. But he kept walking, timing his steps with his breaths and his calmed heart. It surprised him, how steady and long his heart rate was getting. He was really calmed for being in such a strange place.

Then, it happened. The wrongness returned full force. Al it took was one step. One long purposeful step, and all the confidence he’d built to protect himself from the darkness came barreling down. As soon as his left foot touched the floor, he felt the darkness turned even darker, emptier, and colder. Because as soon as his left foot touched the floor, he felt the warm smooth floor be replaced with an equally warm _wet_ surface.

And his sense of smell, which up until that point had remained unused, exploded, filling his nostrils with the sour metallic smell of blood. His mouth found itself enveloped with the warm moist iron taste of blood. Warm, fresh blood.

He removed his foot from the blood and took a step back, but it had touched the blood. It felt _marked_. And his sense of touch, as his sense of smell, had heightened as soon as it had touched the blood. So when he put his left foot back, the ghost of the blood still lingered, attached to his bare foot like a second skin. Slithering between his toes, filling his foot from toes to heel.

He felt his breath catch itself on his throat, he was about to force himself to _breathe_ when his body threw its final betrayal on him. Because he wasn’t breathing. He couldn’t. His air was trapped between his lungs and a closed mouth. But his hearing, had chosen that moment to take all sounds in. And his brain froze, because if he wasn’t taking a breath, _why was he still hearing that soft breathing?_

The breathing that a second ago protected him from the penetrating darkness, now turned on him. Stripping him of the tiny fraction of control he had believed he had. The pitch black emptiness around him moved from _wrong_ to _threatening_.

He heard the soft huffing when _It_ inhaled, the long pause then the breath circulated _Its_ lungs, and then the brief puffing when _It_ exhaled were all he could hear. He was frozen with his foot hanging on the air while the blood slid down in small streaks, hiper-exciting the nerves on his foot. He stood there for a few minutes, which objectively had to be just seconds, but in the emptiness of fear and darkness those seconds turned into eternity.

It had to be an _It_ , hadn’t it? It had to. And _It_ was close. Close enough for him to confound his breathing with its. Close enough to… To send his heartrate to the roof. He closed his eyes and breathe as he took his right hand to his chest. In his state, his fingers tensed, and so, he ended with a claw pressed against his chest, digging into his heart. His rapidly beating heart. Two maybe three times faster than the heart he was listening. _Its_ heart.

He turned around straining his eyes to focus on any shape around him. _It_ was really close. It had to be. He shouldn’t be able to hear its heartbeat if _it_ wasn’t right _next to him._ He felt his body tense up and he readied himself to a fight. Arms raised to his chest and feet planted securely on the floor, he turned around a couple of times, trying to assess where could an attack come from.

He moved backwards and his feet touched the blood again. He jumped forward, but then, his other foot touched blood again. He froze again. He moved his feet, trying to feel the floor ahead of him. _Wet._

He moved to the side. _Wet again._

He swallowed and took a tentative step. _Wet._

He let his breath leave his lungs as even as he could, and took another step, and then a third. Every time, trying to feel the floor ahead of him. _Wet, Wet, Wet._

 _I’m standing in a pool of blood._ That thought moved through his brain, coming over and over again with each step he took.

_A fucking large pool of blood._

The blood level wasn’t even an inch deep, but he could feel it slid upwards from his skin, like slime, scaling upwards in his leg with each step he gave. Sticking to his skin and refusing to leave his senses. Burying beneath his skin and the iron smell latching on his nose. _Its_ breath and heartbeats started to increase in volume with each step he took. His fighting stance never leaving his body, becoming a second nature to him.

He wanted to scream, to yell at it to come out and fight him. To scream to whomever took him to the darkness to appear. That thought make him stop.

_N…g…re_

How had he arrived here? Who’d taken him?

_Night…mare_

He stopped in his tracks. Was that it? Was he in a nightmare? He looked around him. Maybe it was. Maybe he was asleep.

Yeah. He felt the uneasiness sweep from his body. A Nightmare. That could be… Probably. It would explain the darkness, and the unending blood.

_Nightmare._

Yeah. The blood wasn’t real, it was a product of his fucked-up brain waves. And the breathing and the heartbeat… that was… _Blue eyes._

He furrowed his brow to the mental image that came. He knew those eyes. Those eyes calmed him, those eyes were capable of stilling the whirlwind that was his brain. He remembered them. He tried to think of the blue eyes… and the hair… _black…_

_Black hair… Black…_

He evened his breath trying to put the face together. There was no blood. There was no darkness, just a dream he needed to wake up. A nightmare that those blue eyes could wake him up from.

A nightmare that…

_“Ha… Ha”_

That sound stopped his train of thought. A dark cackle he would remember anywhere. A sound borne and forged on the pits of hell that traveled directly to his nerves and electrified his body. He felt his anger swim around him. _Clown_

 _He_ could definitively come up with something like this. He could try to play with Jason’s mind like this. Put him in a warehouse with nothing but blood and breaths and heartbeats. Probably a PA system with loudspeakers and amplifiers aimed to mess with his head. That sounded like _him_ …

 _“Ha… Ha… Ha…”_ The strained chuckles came from all around him. Almost mechanical, not entirely a laugh, not entirely human. Then again, the clown wasn’t known for his _humanity._

“ _Fucking third-rate clown_ ” he yelled, finding that his voice was returning to him. “ _Is that you?_ ” Nothing. No answer. He took some steps ahead, ignoring the blood and the warmth expanding up his ankles. “ _Come on, fucking bastard. Show me your ugly mug._ ” He started walking more confidently, feeling a different kind of warmth rise within him. Anger. Anger he could work with.

The fear and the wrongness being drowned in the red hot feeling on his belly was a feeling he was accustomed to. “ _Ha… Ha… haha… hahaha_ ” The cackles moved towards a full blown hysterical laughter that filled the room, reverberating on non-existing walls and creating a cacophony of laughter and echoes of cackles that disoriented him. He started moving towards where he felt the sound was coming from. “ _Where the fuck are you?”_  He bellowed launching in a run to nowhere.

_Nightmare_

No. This wasn’t a Nightmare. This was a fucking game by that deranged asshole. A game he was not going to play. He wasn’t going to let himself be dragged on by that maniac. If he thought this was going to drive him mad, he had another thing coming. “ _Come on_!” he yelled above the laugher inundating the warehouse. “ _Come on, you, dull piece of shit, this is all you can throw at me_?”

_Jason_

Jason stopped on his tracks. _That voice…_ He knew that voice. _Blue eyes, black hair, a scar on his neck._

“ _Ja-son_ _\--_ ” He turned around, he also recognized _that_ voice.

“ _Joker_ ” he muttered under his breath, letting all his anger melt through his body like hot lead. He turned towards the voice. And two things happened at the same time. First, the darkness started to subside. Just a little, just enough for him to start getting some images to his brain. The whole warehouse was covered in a green hue, but he couldn’t make more sense to the images, just threatening silhouettes of amorphous objects around him.

And once the images started to appear, his body stopped working. Suddenly, he was laying down on the warm soft floor and his muscles ached, resisting the basic command for his brain. Pain and fear flared through his brain at this sudden impairment.

_Jason... Nightmare_

Jason closed his eyes and forced them open once again to the green hue. The Joker was there. He was close. Jason could _feel_ him. But his body wasn’t responding. He tried to breathe, but his lungs felt like stone and mortar inside his chest. His muscles felt sore and tired and his bones felt heavy and strained.

Then, a shadow emerged from his peripheral vision. Green, like the rest of the world around him, but this one felt more defined. More alive. Panic rose through his body as the figure grew closer to him while his body refused to move. He was starting to feel aware of his position; with his body resting against his left side, one arm supporting his head, and the other one down his side, hands and arm protectively over his chest, and his legs slightly bent, drawn to his chest. Not quite in a fetal position. His brain immediately conjured an attack pattern to avoid any damage from the shadow. A green shadow he would easily recognize, even in his sleep.

_Nightmare_

He tried to control his heartbeat and force his body to move. But his brain was working too fast, and his body was slow on the uptake. The Clown was getting closer and his body wasn’t responding. He needed something, an assurance, and as if it was an involuntary movement, his left hand moved, ever so slightly, closing around something. Something he’d come to know far too well. An ivory hilt, with an intricate carving around the edge. A bhavacakra, the representation of a soul’s journey through the cycle of existence. A completely blasphemous symbol to be carved into a weapon destined to take the lives of the wretched. Perfectly fitting for him.

His Kris.

He had his Kris with him. Had he had control over his face he would have smiled. But right now, the feeling of his Kris within his fist allowed his mind to regain control over his body, and his anger to melt away the rising panic and sense of wrongness. The green hue was enough light for him, and the clown had made a fatal mistake in thinking he could be deterred with disorienting lights and a muscle relaxant.

_No. Wrong._

The clown, whose shadow was closing in on him, whose hands were about to touch him, to defile him with his wretched skin. His filthy presence was enough to send his boiling rage into an extreme, and when those fingers touched his shoulder he felt as if four claws were sinking into his body, cutting into him like blunted knives. Like the echo of a crowbar.

_“Jason”_

He would have frozen again, he would have stilled and breathed and _thought_ about that wretched voice; but his hand was fisted around his Kris, and his fingers were feeling the carvings on ivory, and the green was mixing itself with the red of this anger about being touched, being _soiled_ by those hands. So Jason forced his body, blasted thorough the unresponsive muscles and the heavy bones, he turned around as fast as he could and drove his Kris through the shadow in a decisive move.

_Wrong_

The clown moved away, surprised, trying to remove himself from the deadly path of his blade. Unsuccessfully. Jason felt with a satisfying shudder how his wavy blade made its way through the body of the disgusting shadow, now fully formed into a human being. It wasn’t until his blade was halfway into the body of the clown that he started feeling a resistance.

The hands that a second ago were touching him, soiling him, were now clasped on the hilt of his dagger, covering his own. Preventing the dagger from going any further into the pile of garbage that the clown clamed as a body. Jason roared as he pushed further into the green body, the hue of the lightning still covering the warehouse not allowing any other color to make itself present in his brain.

_Wrong_

He smiled wickedly with satisfaction. One push, and one twist. One turn of his wavy blade and the demonic clown wouldn’t be anymore. His mission finally over. His purpose, fulfilled.

Just one twist, and he could look up and see the life escape on the brown deranged eyes. He could stop dreaming about green hair and crimson lips. He could see that face lose all color and be plunged into eternal darkness.

_Wrong!_

He wanted that…

_WRONG!_

He needed that…

_WRONG!!!_

Just one twist and he’ll be free, he’ll…

“ _J-ay_ ”

Jason’s body stopped all function as his brain started to reboot. _That_ voice. The same voice he’d heard seconds ago. The voice that calmed him and centered him.

He looked up to see the face of the Clown. Green hair, green eyes, green lips, green skin.

_… No._

Then, as if someone had lifted a spell, as if a light had been turned and a curtain opened to reveal the hidden window, the green dissipated. The green hair didn’t remain green, instead it turned black, messy, long and slightly curled; the lips didn’t turned crimson, but pink and full, frozen in a mocking scowl; the skin didn’t turned white and chalky, but pink and fair. And the eyes… the eyes turned blue, big and scared… so, so scared.

_No._

Jason watched, as if he’d been transported into a parallel reality where his body was nothing but a conduit for the screening of a movie, how the body in front of him morphed from the hated warped body of the Clown, to the body of his boyfriend, of his Tim. As his body slowly lost a battle to gravity and started falling towards the bed. The bed he was lying in, a second ago. The bed he’d been lying in, and having a nightmare. A nightmare Tim had tried to wake him from.

Tim’s body plunged into the mattress with a small whimper. That sound broke the spell that had Jason captive, and his body became his own again “No, no, no… Babybird! Fuck, no.” he turned Tim on his back and looked at the Kris that sank on his flesh, turning his nightclothes to a crimson red.

He needed to do something. To stop the bleeding. To help his baby bird.

Help…

He needed help.

He looked around and suddenly the surroundings came into focus. He recognized the expensive mattress, the tall old closets, and the plain expensive wallpaper.

_I’m at the Manor._

He could get help in the Manor. _Bruce_.

_Bruce is in the Manor._

Later, Jason could dissect why the thought of Bruce being close calmed him. Later, when his baby bird wasn’t bleeding out on his bed, he could berate himself for relying on the man he’d come to distrust and even hate for _not being reliable_. He could think about all of this things. Right now, the only good part of his life was dying and Bruce could help.

He stood up and ran to the door, blasting it open without care for the old wood. “Help!” he screamed, he didn’t care to leave the fear out of his voice. “Please! Bruce, Help, Alfred, ANYONE. PLEASE. HELP.” He didn’t care that his voice broke at the end, nor that he sounded weak and hurt. He only cared that he heard a door opening somewhere.

Someone was coming. Help was coming.

He turned and looked at the scene in front of him. Tim, dressed only with a blue nightshirt and black boxer briefs, splayed on the white bed. Tim, resting in a crimson pool of his own blood with both hands pressed on his gut, pressed against his Kris.

A Kris he’d rammed inside him.

_I stabbed Tim._

That simple thought was enough to fill his bones with an icy chill and push all other thoughts out of his mind.

_I stabbed Tim._

He barely felt his body stopping in the doorway. His eyes were focused on the crimson on his hands. All sounds around him suddenly became a background white noise. He barely felt the hand pressed on his shoulder and the grave voice next to him. He barely felt the push to the side and the crash against the wall.

All he felt was the blood sticking to his hands. His senses hyperaware only on the blood in his hands. _Tim’s blood_ burying in his skin and the iron smell latching to his nose.

He didn’t hear the scream, nor the instructions. He didn’t see the movement around him. Just the blood. So much blood.

_I killed Tim_

The certainty of the statement left him empty. In a way he hadn’t felt when he’d learnt of Willis arrest, or when he found Catherine overdosed, or when his mother turned him over to the clown, or when Bruce didn’t arrived; or even when his plans hadn’t succeeded. All those times, _the certainty_ he’d felt had drove him to _act_. But…

_I killed him._

This time the certainty only left a deep numbness. A crimson numbness that made all sound and color around him freeze into nothingness.

_I…_

Jason closed his eyes and dove into the darkness. He wanted it, he wanted the darkness. He wished to go back to that dark warehouse, he wanted to be surrounded in that pool of blood, haunted by the Clown, he wanted to wake up into that nightmare; because then, this crimson hell would be just a dream.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone, 
> 
> I hope you've liked the story, this is my first story in AO3, and in this fandom. I hope I managed to capture the atmosphere of a nightmare.
> 
> So far this is a one-shot I've had in my mind for a couple of weeks, after I woke up from a bad nightmare. I have a couple of ideas on how this scenario would follow, so I might turn this into a series.
> 
> Finally, I am not an English native-speaker and I am doing most of these stories to improve my writing skills; so any comments and suggestions will be really appreciated.


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